Princip was nineteen years old at the time and too young to be executed, as he was twenty-seven days shy of the twenty-year minimum age limit required by Habsburg law.[43] On Thursday 28 October 1914 the court found Princip guilty of murder and high treason, he received the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison

Princip asserted that the First World War would have occurred even if the assassination had not taken place, and that he “cannot feel himself responsible for the catastrophe”.

Legacy

Long after his death, Princip’s legacy is still disputed and he remains a historically significant but polarising figure. For the Habsburg monarchy and its supporters, he was a murderous terrorist; Royal Yugoslavia portrayed him as a Yugoslav hero; during World War II, Nazis and Croatian fascist Ustasha viewed him as a degenerate criminal and a left-wing anarchist; and for socialist Yugoslavia, he represented a youthful hero of armed resistance, a freedom fighter who fought to liberate all the peoples of Yugoslavia from Imperial rule, fighting for the workers and the oppressed.[59] In the 1990s, Princip started to be seen by some as a Serbian nationalist acting for the creation of a Greater Serbia.[60] Political movements and regimes have either praised or demonized him to promote their ideology.[60]

Today he is still celebrated as a hero by numerous Serbs and regarded as a terrorist by many Croats and Bosniaks.[60][61] Asim Sarajlić, a senior MP of the Bosniak nationalist Party of Democratic Action, stated in 2014 that Princip brought an end to “a golden era of history under Austrian rule” and that “we are strongly against the mythology of Princip as a fighter of freedom”.[59] Many of Bosnia’s Serbs continue to venerate his memory: Nenad Samardžija, the Serb governor of East Sarajevo, said in 2014 that “we once all lived in one state (Yugoslavia), and we never looked on it as any kind of terrorist act” but “a movement of young people who wanted to liberate themselves from colonial slavery”.[62]